Part 15 (1/2)

Everyone pointing.

Everyone laughing.

Except the kid, who was looking more and more like Danny with each pa.s.sing second.

Once again he looked up at Chester.

”Go,” he said, while the crowd laughed and the Barker sneered, the woman shouted her jeering insults, and Chester Roebuck turned and forced his way through men and women and children alike, beating a path through them, back to the midway, which by now he realized he should never have left in the first place.

It was just a woman, a stupid old woman and a stupid old kid, and a crowd of stupid old people. What did he care what they thought, buncha morons.

He could still hear them laughing as he stomped his way down the midway, past the Sideshow tent, to the attraction he was the most interested in. The main attraction.

The only attraction, as far as Chester was concerned.

He could see it looming off in the distance, its high, gleaming rails reaching up and tickling the very moon itself. Hannibal Cobb's Screaming Rails Of Death, the sign said, and Chester Roebuck could hardly wait to ride it to the stars.

”Step right up,” a man called out. Dressed in a blue and white striped t-s.h.i.+rt, he had a gold hoop in one ear and one in his nose. He stood beside a peg-legged woman, whose dark red hair spilled over her shoulders in ringlets and curls. She had on a white blouse and khaki pants, and she was short, a pretty little thing who couldn't have been more than four feet tall. She was smiling, smiling and beckoning Chester forward.

”This way, friend,” she said, as Chester approached her. ”That's it, that's right. Step right on up.”

The ride pulled up in front of Chester like the civil war era steam locomotive it so resembled, like a pa.s.senger train pulling up to a railway station. Pa.s.sengers departed and a new set quickly replaced them, until all the cars were full, save for the lead car, the one at the very front, which must have been saved specifically for Chester, who was taken by the hand by the one-legged woman and led directly to it.

She smiled when she lowered the bar that locked him securely into his seat, smiled and said, ”We've been waiting.”

He sat for a moment, alone in a car that could easily have held another three people, but n.o.body stepped forward to join him-no one even tried. A crowd of people lined up in front of the peg-legged woman, and her mate stood silently by, watching Chester Roebuck settle back into a seat of rich, plush leather. There were sounds in the air: the rush of steam, the churn of an engine, the buzz of the crowd as somebody called out, ”All aboard, folks! All aboard Hannibal Cobb's Screaming Rails Of Death!”

”Alllllll aboarrrrrd!” the crowd called out as the whistle blew, the train left the station and the ride jerked forward, and then started to climb. Higher and higher it rose, looping and swirling and dipping and diving, Chester's heart high in his throat as his fingers clutched the security bar, and those coupled cars executed an impossible stomach-churning, three-hundred and sixty degree spin, high above the crowd below them.

His eyes were wide, his hands high in the air when they came out of the spin and started a slow and steady uphill climb. The old train whistle blew loud and long, the wooden planks supporting those gleaming steel rails groaning as the cars rose straight up toward the sky. Chester, pressed snug against his seat as if he were lying flat on his back on the ground, stared up at stars so close he could almost reach out and touch them.

The engine chugged as the rush of steam filled the air around him. The whistle blew and somebody started to cry. Chester turned to look to see who it was, to offer a consoling word or two, but the laws of gravity wouldn't allow it. So he stayed in his seat and stared up at that fat, full moon, at the s.h.i.+mmering stars that surrounded it.

”Look at *em go!” a far away voice called out, so far away, Chester barely even heard it.

He looked down at the clearing, surprised to see that everything had changed. Gone were most of the stalls and booths; gone were the gleaming food wagons, and tents of fine white canvas, leaving behind a few straggly carts and a couple of worn and weathered tents. All the people who had laughed at him, and those who had cheered him on as the ride had departed-they were gone too, replaced by a rabble of rednecks who wandered aimlessly throughout the clearing.

There was Jack Everett, sitting on a log in the middle of G.o.dby's field.

And there was old man Kreigle, spinning around in a circle, head thrown back, arms held straight out at his sides, smiling and staring up at the sky.

And here was Chester Roebuck, in the sleek black carriage of a roller coaster climbing all the way up to the stars. The ride jerked forward and Chester closed his eyes. He could feel himself rising, higher and higher, the cool wind brus.h.i.+ng across his face as he went higher, still. The car leveled out as the ride reached its zenith, and then stopped entirely when the car curled forward, leaving Chester Roebuck staring wide-eyed down the rails, at a pinpoint of light that could only have been the clearing, miles and miles away from him.

He was smiling now, because it was getting good now, getting to it.

The car would drop and his heart would rush to his throat, the laws of gravity suspended as the ride plummeted ever-downward, spinning and twirling and loop-de-looping, the crowd cheering and riders screaming, all the way down to the end of the line.

He closed his eyes and smiled, opened them and Hannibal Cobb appeared beside him.

”You've been a bad boy tonight, haven't you?” Cobb said. ”Done a very bad thing. But that's not very surprising, is it? Not really. You come from a long line of folks who've done a long, sordid laundry list of bad things... Don't you?”

Chester said nothing.

He stared wide-eyed at Hannibal Cobb as if he were a shroud of ectoplasm hovering before him.

Then the ride jerked and Cobb winked out like a snuffed candle.

The bottom fell out and Chester Roebuck plummeted straight down those gleaming steel rails, to a place he really didn't want to see.

Chapter Twenty-Six.

After all these years, Jack Everett had finally met a man equal to himself. He could tell by the way Hannibal Cobb talked, by the look in those coal black eyes of his that he was a powerful man used to getting his way, a man to be reckoned with. Just like Jack Everett himself, who lorded over Pottsboro, South Carolina just as Hannibal Cobb ruled his little backwoods country carnival, which Jack was beginning to find was not such a small place after all. From the happy little clown standing beneath the *welcome to the carnival' sign in his orange outfit and his elaborately painted face, to the Ferris wheel spinning high above the treetops, all the way down to the huge skysc.r.a.per of a roller coaster Chester Roebuck had been so infatuated with, everything in this place seemed big. So big, in fact, that Jack didn't see how it all could have fit into G.o.dby's field. Jack didn't remember the place being so wide and spread out, and he'd spent many a night out here, back in the fifties when his grandfather was riding herd with those white-sheeted pals of his. Jack had seen some s.h.i.+t back then, all right. From beatings and hangings, to rapes and murders and everything in between, Jack had pretty much seen it all. Of course, times had changed since then. Now days, one man kept his foot on the neck of another in a more subtle fas.h.i.+on: a telephone call to excise his job; a word to Charlie Strawn to call in his note, a stroke of a pen to foreclose on his house and property, sometimes shutting down, if not his lifestyle, his very life itself. And Jack Everett, who considered himself to be an enlightened man, an equal opportunity type of guy, had lowered his economic boom on a great many families in and around Pottsboro, South Carolina, irregardless of race, creed or color.

They stood at the entrance sizing each other up, two powerful personalities gauging what stood before them. Jack saw respect in the man's dark eyes, a genuine regard for the wealth and breeding that stood before him. And why not? They weren't really equals. Jack's forefathers had settled this land, claiming a huge swatch of it for themselves. Through the years the Everett clan had built fortune upon fortune up and down and all around South Carolina. Elections had been swayed on their say-so, governors planted firmly in office and governors run from the capital building with their tails tucked firmly beneath them. Few men could be considered Jack Everett's equal, certainly not some country hick from the dusty plains of northwestern Missouri. He wasn't Jack's equal, but he was close. He was close, all right. Jack could feel it in his sixty-three year old bones.

They stood there, eye to eye, until Cobb waved him in and bade him welcome, and Jack and his cronies headed up the midway, past the Sideshow tent and the food wagons, the booths and stalls with their hip young games and high tech gadgetry. The smells wafting from those wagons were intoxicating. Not the usual carnival fare, but top shelf cuisine found in five-star hotels the world over: lobster tails in rich, creamy b.u.t.ter, roasted duck in a thick sherry sauce that would melt that tender meat right off the bone and into your mouth. No funnel cakes here, no sirree. Just a cart piled high with enough fluffy white pastries and rich, decadent cakes to have made the finest chefs in all of France proud to have presided over it. And the women manning these carts, all of them five-star beauties themselves, smiling and winking at Jack as he strolled by, all of them free and available for the grand patriarch of Pottsboro, South Carolina's taking.

So many beautiful women were there sauntering up and down the midway that Jack barely noticed when Tricia Reardon and her little companion struck out on their own. Didn't matter to Jack, though. He'd see her soon enough-she loved him, as did every woman he had ever graced with his presence. It was his money, he guessed, and the attention he lavished upon them.

He left Chester Roebuck at a crowd of people lined up in front of Hannibal Cobb's Screaming Rails Of Death, a roller coaster ride made up of sleek black carriages resembling the pa.s.senger cars of an old-time locomotive. Up, up, and up, that roller coaster went, while Chester stepped forward and Jim Kreigle ran off squawking about the spinning cups-although no matter how high or low Jack looked, he saw no Spinning Teacup ride anywhere on the premises.

No one seemed to notice the blood spattered across his front as he wandered through the carnival grounds. Or maybe they did notice, but out of respect for his station in life, they chose wisely to ignore it. After all, he was the town's benefactor. It was he they ran to when an unsolvable problem arose, he they came to when the going got tough and there was nowhere else to go, no one else to turn to. Jack Everett, who held all the answers in a bank account sizable enough to bail anyone out of any kind of trouble. If he wanted to, of course. And G.o.d help you if he didn't want to. G.o.d help you if you ever found yourself out of Jack's good graces, with nowhere to turn but to the good Lord above, who could get you into heaven, but could do nothing to get your mother on the list for the Green Grove Extended Care Facility in Columbia, South Carolina.

He wandered through the crowd, stopping here to watch a young child fire a laser dart at an electronic target; pausing there to watch a young girl hopscotch her way down a grid of multicolored neon boxes, while yet another child fired an electrically-charged rifle at a holographic image of a snarling lion that looked real enough to jump out of its confines and bite a chunk right out of you. All things he had dreamt of as a young child himself, but never thought he'd live to see them come to pa.s.s. Not in his lifetime, anyway. But there they were, right before his very eyes, as bells chimed and whistles sounded all around him, carnival music and the frantic and excited voices of people charging up and down the midway floated along the cool, crisp night air.

And there was more: teenaged boys standing on surfboards miraculously suspended two feet above the ground, sliding down the steep face of holographic waves in the middle of a field in a far off corner of South Carolina. A man stepping through a doorway on a wooden platform on one side of the midway, only to emerge a scant second later from an identical threshold on the far side of the clearing; children strapped inside thin circular stainless steel tubes, spinning in place, forward and sideways as the thin metal rings-completely unattached to any kind of mechanism-rose up and down like disembodied gyroscopes, jockeying forward and back as boys screamed and girls squealed, and the ride, this fantastic, futuristic contraption went round and round.

He saw these things as he walked the midway toward a murmuring crowd of people gathered at the base of that ever-spinning Ferris wheel. They were agitated, excited about something, and as he neared them he saw exactly what had gotten them so worked up: a nickel-plated Lamborghini LP640, basking in a spotlight emanating from G.o.d only knew where, *cause Jack sure as h.e.l.l didn't know where that laser beam of stark white light was being directed from as it swept back and forth across the body of that high performance work of art. It stood with its door wide open, waiting for someone to come tame it, and as the crowd parted, smiling as the town's foremost entrepreneur made their way through them; Jack Everett knew that he was just the guy to do it.

They smiled.

They clapped.

A hand or two found his back, giving it a st.u.r.dy pat or two as he paused by that slick and s.h.i.+ning automobile, running a hand across its gleaming smooth surface. Jack stood for a moment, admiring a sleek piece of workmans.h.i.+p that surely must have tallied ten times the cost of the sleek black Caddy he called his own, which all of the sudden did not seem quite so sleek, nor quite as s.h.i.+ny as it had when he'd fired it up in front of the Wagon Wheel Bar and Grill this afternoon. He stood for a moment. Then he folded himself into the driver's seat, swung his feet onboard and slammed the door shut behind him.

Being strapped inside that car was like Jack imagined it would be like strapped into the c.o.c.kpit of an F-15 fighter jet. Staring at that futuristic-looking dashboard was like gazing upon the controls of some far off lights.h.i.+p no one had ever been fortune enough to have actually piloted. As a child, he had read comic books and far-out science fiction novels, and dreamt of things like this, and now his wildest dreams were actually coming true. The keys hung from the ignition like forbidden fruit, and as Jack reached for them he felt like Adam taking a swipe at the apple Eve had presented to him.

He looked out the winds.h.i.+eld, at a moonlit road that wound its way through a stark desert landscape, and knew that all the fantastic gizmos and gadgets he had witnessed so far tonight could never top the ride he was about to embark upon. He turned the key and the engine roared to life, stomped on the gas pedal and it howled into the night. Twin beams of light pierced the darkness as a heavy metal tune exploded from the sound system. Gunning the engine was like dropping down the steep side of the highest roller coaster ride any theme park this side of the Mississippi had ever seen. So he gunned it a couple of more times just for good measure, and the crowd he had forgotten all about, now out of sight on either side of him as he stared out through the winds.h.i.+eld at that dark, moonlit landscape, began to call out his name.

”Go, Jackie!” they said.

”Let 'er rip, son!” they cried out, as Jack grabbed the gears.h.i.+ft and stepped on the clutch, gunning it a couple of more times before slamming it into gear and tearing off down that dark and deserted highway: sixty miles an hour in second gear, ninety in third. Before he knew it he was screaming down the highway at two-hundred and nineteen miles an hour. Soaring like a bird, riding a rocket straight to the moon, he flew through the night, a child in an old man's body, the wind at his back, the full moon looming in the sky above him.

A man appeared in the roadway and Jack ran him over.